Meth
and Crack: Same Myth, Different Year

Here we go again.Back in the 1980s it was
the “crack” mania, with all sorts of exaggerated hype about “crack babies” and
similar stories. There is a pattern to how the media deal with public issues
like this one. In virtually all stories on this topic and related topics, the
issue is framed in a similar fashion. Typically, a specific and egregious
example is described. A search is done for similar stories and soon the
conclusion is reached that there is some sort of “trend” or, worse still, an
“epidemic.” This is augmented by some juicy comments from representatives of law
enforcement and in some cases celebrities and politicians are asked about their
opinions (as if they have done some careful research on the issue). Rarely are
researchers contacted. In the case of both “crack” and “meth” medical
researchers are ignored, at least at first. Much of the “evidence” cited is
anecdotal and the focus is almost always on a few, isolated and exceptional
cases (otherwise it would not be “news”) which are then followed by gross
generalizations.My
friend Jerry Kurelic has offered a unique way of explaining this phenomenon
often used by the media and also by political pundits. He uses the acronym
W.I.S.E. which is as follows: Withhold information that is contrary to
their opinion; identify that which is consistent with their opinion;
sensationalize that which is consistent with your opinion; expand it
as if it is representative of the whole.

In the stories below, there
are two carefully crafted articles by Maia Szalavitz, written about a year and a
half apart, plus one example of the exaggerated hype, which in turn is followed
by an “open letter” to the public written by an expert on the subject.

***********

The
Media's Meth Baby Mania

Maia Szalavitz

September 1, 2005

When crack was the
scariest drug of all, "crack babies" were the culmination of the terror.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of them in 1989, "A cohort of babies is now
being born whose future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of
certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority."

As it turns out, none of that was true. In fact, being labeled a "crack baby"
appears to have done more harm to these children than the cocaine itself did.
And with news stories popping up about "meth babies" in our latest drug panic,
we seem to be about to repeat this shameful pattern.

Children born to mothers addicted to crack cocaine did have serious
problems--but most of these were related to the fact that their mothers lacked
prenatal care, were extremely poor and drank alcohol, smoked cigarettes and took
other drugs as well as crack cocaine.

Women who do not stop using drugs or drinking during pregnancy tend to be
those with long, complicated histories of victimization and mental illness (Over
two thirds have survived childhood sexual abuse and/or are current victims of
domestic violence, for example). It's undoubtedly a bad idea to use cocaine (or
any drug, for that matter) during pregnancy--but the damage associated with
prenatal cocaine exposure is
less severe than that caused by alcohol and comparable to the harm done by
cigarette smoking.

But being exposed to domestic violence as a baby or young child, in fact, is
a far better predictor of behavior problems and low IQ than cocaine exposure in
utero is. And, one study found that kids labeled "crack babies" (though they
were actually not) were treated far worse than those who had not been tagged
that way. When medical professionals thought they were dealing with a "crack
baby," they interpreted normal behavior as abnormal and ascribed bad intentions
to it.

Which brings us to the current methamphetamine panic. In a story with a
headline that could have been pulled from the 1980s crack scare, "A Drug Scourge
Creates its Own Form of Orphan" (7/11/05), Kate Zernike of the New York Times
reported that 40% of child welfare officials say that methamphetamine has caused
a rise in the number of kids taken into foster care; but the national numbers
for those in foster care (which go un-cited in the Times article) have declined
from 570,000 in 1999 to 523,000 in 2003--a period during which methamphetamine
use was supposedly rising.

Foster care numbers often show a lag of several years in relation to drug
problems because it takes time for people to become addicted, have children and
then come to the attention of child welfare authorities. But during the crack
epidemic, the number of kids in foster care went from 243,000 in 1982 to 400,000
in 1990 and it continued rising until 1999, despite the far earlier decline in
crack use. So it's clear that if meth is causing an increase, it's nowhere near
that associated with crack.

But foster care trends tend to be fed more by perceptions and theories than
by the number of kids who are actually abused. Heavily reported instances of
kids abused by dangerous parents (the case of Elisa Izquierdo in New York, for
example) lead to increases in foster care admissions. Curiously, however, highly
publicized cases of abuse in foster care usually don't lead to increased
emphasis on "family preservation." Foster care trends, unsurprisingly, are also
connected to poverty; but even so, some states tend to take more children from
their families than others, regardless of poverty and regardless of drug use
trends.

Unfortunately, foster care itself can do harm. According to Richard Wexler,
Executive Director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, only
20% of kids leaving foster care do well by the standard measures of employment
and education and mental health. A study by Casey Family Programs found that
foster care kids have double the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder seen in
Gulf War veterans.

Of course, some of these problems are undoubtedly due to the reasons that
they were seen as needing foster care in the first place--but one third of kids
in foster care in this study reported being abused by their new caretakers and
the effects of moving from one home to another as foster kids often do are
uniformly negative. The average number of placements for kids in foster care
(how many transitions from one home to another they experienced) was seven in
this study. As Wexler says, "The best evidence we have is that drug treatment
for the parents is almost always a better option than foster care for the
children."

Given that media coverage drives foster care trends, it behooves editors and
reporters to consider explicitly in their coverage whether foster care could do
more harm than methamphetamine. It's especially important in this context to
stop promoting the idea that meth addiction is harder to treat than other drug
problems. Amazingly, in Zernike's Times article, she claims, with no factual
basis, that treatment for methamphetamine requires a longer stay in care than
treatment for crack did (treatment stays for all drugs are universally shorter
since the advent of managed care--and there's no evidence that this has reduced
efficacy).

She says, also incorrectly, that because of a 1997 law, this means that
parental rights are likely to be terminated faster. The law makes an exception
for people who are doing well in treatment. Zernike goes on to quote an Iowa
child welfare advocate who says that because of meth's longer recovery time, "We
know pretty early that these families are not going to get back together." But
since this is based on a myth about treatment failure--and unfortunately child
advocates who have a say in whether families get back together believe it--the
Times is helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy by reporting it.

There is also a financial battle underlying child welfare agencies'
relationship to methamphetamine, according to Wexler, that should have been
covered in reporting on it. Federal budget efforts are underway to make foster
care funding more flexible--to allow some of it, for example, to be used to
treat addicted parents rather than to place kids in care. This, of course, would
shift funds away from these agencies and towards drug treatment providers.
Flexible funding wouldn't gain much support, of course, if "meth monsters" are
untreatable.

Coverage of this issue should not present foster care agencies simply as
disinterested child advocates, consequently.

It is certainly true that active stimulant addicts can be highly abusive and
neglectful towards their children--and there are absolutely some cases where
this should lead to custody termination. But because interventions like foster
care can sometimes do harm, the media needs to be especially cautious when
demonizing a drug to advocate them -- or else reporters risk hurting the
innocent victims they are supposedly trying to help. Wexler has written to the
Times' ombudsman to complain about the Zernike story and a group of key
researchers on addiction and children have written
an open letter to the media, but as this NBC news story
demonstrates, the hype appears to be unstoppable.

Why doesn't the media ever ask "Cui bono?" when it comes to drug scares?
Could it be because "we do" is one of the only truthful answers?

Here’s the NBC new
story she refers to:

Meth’s youngest victims
Children of meth lab homes are placed into foster care

By Kevin Corke

Correspondent

Updated: 7:57 p.m. ET Aug. 9, 2005

CLERMONT COUNTY, Ohio - Days like these leave Child
Protective Services Agent Joy Swing feeling like a drug counselor.

“It seems every case we get is drug-related,” says Swing as
she makes another visit with someone whose children have been taken away because
police suspected meth use in the home.

Swing talks with a man in his living room. The exchange is
quick. She tells the man his son won’t be coming back as planned.

Over the past five years, the man’s child is one of 85 who
have been pulled from what police say are meth lab homes and placed into foster
care.

The number is so overwhelming for this rural community
they’ve even had trouble placing some newborn babies.

It’s also something Clermont County Sheriff Tim Rodenberg
never imagined would happen here.

“It actually rips up the fabric of your community in many
ways, says Rodenberg, “Children are often involved at sites where meth labs are
operating.”

Once thought to be a rural and small-town problem, meth use
is spreading so quickly it’s now proving a major challenge even for the nation’s
top drug enforcement officer, National Drug Control Policy Director John
Walters.

“The damage this has done to children is the worst thing
I’ve seen with regard to the meth problem,” says Walters. “I think it gives us
an enormously powerful reason to act quickly.”

The Drug Enforcement Agency calls them “meth orphans,” and
last year, the DEA says some 3,000 children were pulled from homes during meth
lab seizures.

That’s troubling, not just for the families involved, but
for an already overburdened foster care system.

According to a National Association of Counties survey,
during the past five years, 71 percent of responding counties in California
reported an increase in out-of-home placements because of meth. The number is
70 percent in Colorado, and in Minnesota, there was a 69 percent increase just
in the last year.

For the fortunate few, there are scheduled, monitored
visitations between separated parents and children.

But Swing acknowledges, “Now we have so many in foster care
... we’re running out of homes.”

And time is running out to warn others of a coming storm
that’s already leaving its mark on rural America.

********

Charles
Krauthammer wrote, "A cohort of babies is now being born whose future is closed
to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable
deviance, of permanent inferiority."

Many "crack
babies" were actually withdrawing from heroin and other opiates that their
mothers had used. Opiate withdrawal leads to behavior like jerking and
shaking--but cocaine was blamed for these symptoms, even though it doesn't cause
withdrawal illness.

When four starving boys aged 19,
14, 10 and 9, were taken from their New Jersey adoptive parents last October,
all were severely emaciated. The oldest was so stunted--he weighed 45 pounds and
measured four feet tall--that police thought he was a grade-schooler. He had
been found by neighbors, rooting through their trash for food at 2:30 a.m. He
was so weak, he couldn't even open the Tastykake they hastily offered.

The press was quick to blame New
Jersey's child welfare agency. Although social workers had visited the family 38
times over two years, they had never sought help for the starving boys, who were
said to have subsisted on a diet of uncooked pancake mix, cereal, peanut butter
and wallboard. As soon as they were taken from their adoptive parents, Raymond
and Vanessa Jackson, the boys rapidly started gaining weight.

After the Jacksons were arrested
for child abuse, their pastor, Harry Thomas, began a public relations campaign
to defend the couple. The media had noted that the Jacksons' six other
children--three biological children, two adopted daughters and one foster
daughter--were well fed and clothed. Thomas said this was because the adopted
boys were tough cases. They had eating disorders. They were victims of fetal
alcohol syndrome. Worst of all, they were "crack babies," and presumably as a
result, the oldest was "a habitual liar."

The Jacksons apparently had
managed to evade neighbors' and social workers' suspicions for years by
attributing their adoptive sons' problems to the fact that their mothers smoked
crack cocaine while pregnant. That this excuse still seemed reasonable--20 years
after the 1980s crack 'crisis' and over a decade after the medical community
dismissed the "crack baby" as a media myth--shows how resilient and pernicious
the stereotype is.

In a century of drug scare
stories, the "crack baby" was a crowning achievement. Throughout the late 1980s
and early 1990s, images of horrifyingly tiny, herky-jerky infants with eerie,
cat-like cries flooded television screens and prompted columns about a new
"biological underclass" and a "lost generation." Media coverage of the crack
"epidemic" began as a trickle in 1984, but by the following year had exploded
into a tsunami. Crack, Nancy Reagan said, was "killing a whole generation."

President Reagan declared "war on
drugs" in 1986, and in July of that year alone, the networks' evening news
programs ran 74 crack stories; in the run-up to the election, over 1,000
articles about crack appeared in newspapers and magazines. Meanwhile, the media
had gotten hold of Ira Chasnoff's 1985 New England Journal of Medicine
report on the possible consequences of cocaine use by 28 pregnant women. The
study cautioned that the data was preliminary and no conclusions about causality
could be drawn from it. But the ground was already sown for panic, and the media
had no compunction about predicting the worst imaginable consequences.

Within days, CBS News had
found a social worker treating an 18-month-old "cocaine-exposed" baby, who
claimed that the child would grow up to be "a 21-year old with an IQ of perhaps
50, barely able to dress herself." By 1989, a National Institute on Drug Abuse
psychologist claimed that exposure to cocaine in utero "was interfering with the
central core of what it is to be human." Columnist Charles Krauthammer alleged,
"A cohort of babies is now being born whose future is closed to them from day
one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of
permanent inferiority. At best, a menial life of severe deprivation. And all of
this is biologically determined from birth."

Evidence to support these claims
was no stronger in 1989 than in 1985. In fact, as soon as more careful studies
were done, with proper control groups and other measures to rule out other
factors that could have led to developmental problems, the link between cocaine
use during pregnancy and major difficulties in infants began to look far less
certain. As early as 1992, the Journal of the American Medical Association
decried "the rush to judgment" on the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure.

So what, exactly, does the
medical research show about the effects of cocaine on infants exposed in utero?
And what caused the so-called "crack babies" to seem so sickly?

As it turns out, those scrawny
infants in the neonatal intensive care units who made for such dramatic video
had mothers whose problems went far beyond crack cocaine. For one, most of their
babies hadn't received prenatal care. Often as a result, they were born
premature.

Premature birth can be caused by
all sorts of medical problems that might well have been caught and treated if
the mother had gotten health care during pregnancy. These problems can damage a
child, even when they have no direct connection to drug use. In fact,
prematurity is demonstrably much riskier for fetuses compared to a mother's use
of cocaine.

When the media showed images of
"crack babies," it was often depicting prematurity rather than signs of drug
exposure. High-pitched cries and jerky movements, for instance, are common in
preemies. (On the other hand, some babies born too early--and some
cocaine-exposed infants as well--act abnormally calm, or "floppy." But these
newborns weren't chosen by the media to illustrate the "crack baby" problem.)

In addition, many "crack babies"
were actually withdrawing from heroin and other opiates that their mothers had
used along with cocaine, alcohol and tobacco. Opiate withdrawal leads to jerking
and shaking--but cocaine was blamed forthese
symptoms, even though it doesn't cause withdrawal illness. While withdrawal from
opiates is unpleasant for the infant, being exposed to them before birth does no
lasting harm. Alcohol and tobacco, on the other hand, can seriously damage
fetuses. Not surprisingly, both of these legal substances were widely used by
"crack mothers."

To make matters worse, these
mothers also typically had long histories of poverty and victimization. More
than two thirds had been sexually abused as children or were current victims of
domestic violence. It was also quite common for them to have witnessed traumatic
events, like seeing a relative murdered. Most were depressed.

All these stressors, particularly
in combination, can seriously threaten a pregnancy. And they're probably a big
reason "crack mothers" sought chemical escape in the first place. Profound
stress is believed to be such an important factor in prematurity and other
neonatal development problems that the March of Dimes' Campaign to Prevent Birth
Defects recently targeted stress as a priority research area.

Amid all these problems, prenatal
exposure to cocaine was just one part of a very complex and disturbing
picture--and, it turned out, not a very significant part. Dr. Deborah Frank,
Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine,
published a review of the research in the Journal of the American Medical
Association in 2001. The next year, she testified that "there are small but
identifiable effects of prenatal cocaine-crack exposure on certain newborn
outcomes, very similar to those associated with prenatal tobacco exposure. There
is less consistent evidence of long term effects up to age six years, which is
the oldest age for which published information is available... Based on years of
careful research, we conclude the crack baby is a grotesque media stereotype,
not a scientific diagnosis."

Says Ira Chasnoff, the author of
the first New England Journal report, "From the earliest studies,
[researchers] showed that there was no effect on IQ." As for behavior, he adds,
"It's very difficult to say. There do appear to be some effects. It's still up
in the air--some research says yes, some says no. Right now there's no
consensus."

But experts do agree that
cocaine-exposed babies are in no way doomed to a life of degeneracy, illiteracy
and crime. According to Chasnoff, the most consistently noted effect of mothers'
cocaine use on children is subtle difficulties with what researchers call
"executive function: the ability to plan, organize and complete tasks." Such
problems can look like attention-deficit disorder (ADD) because the child has
difficulty seeing things through to completion or remaining focused long enough
to do schoolwork well.

Even if these problems do occur,
they're not necessarily irreversible. Treatments similar to those for ADD can
help. And raising a child in a nurturing, healthy environment makes a huge
difference. Says Chasnoff, "By six years old, if you look at intellectual
functioning, the single most important factor that predicts IQ is whether the
mother continued to use [cocaine or its derivatives] after pregnancy, not
during." Frank adds that a child's exposure to violence after birth predicts
behavioral and IQ lags, much more than does prenatal exposure to cocaine.

Further, according to Frank,
being labeled a "crack baby" may hurt a child far more than exposure to drugs
does. "The stigma sometimes leads people to ignore real problems: 'Oh, that's
just because he's a crack baby,'" she says, citing the Jackson kids. "Children
like them are thought to be hopeless."

Frank has done chilling research
on this phenomenon. In one study, she asked professionals to pick out the "crack
babies" from a group of infants. "Even people of good will think they can tell
who is a 'crack baby' and who isn't," she says. "In fact, they can't." Even more
frighteningly, another study showed students videotapes of two healthy toddlers.
If the children had been labeled crack babies, normal behavior was interpreted
as pathological. Frank recalls giving a lecture and being approached afterwards
by a woman who had adopted her cocaine-exposed nephew. "At two days old, the
nurses told her the baby was a congenital liar!" Frank says. "One woman thought
that her 18 month old still had crack in his system because he wouldn't stay
quiet during a four-hour church service." Children who are labeled as crack
babies may come to see themselves as destined for low achievement and bad
behavior. That perception can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If the crack baby is a mere
figment, why has it persisted in our collective imagination? Why, in the 21st
century, can parents be allowed to starve their children and blame their failure
to grow on a label that doesn't correspond to reality?

Craig Reinarman, Professor of
Sociology at the University of California-Santa Cruz, says the answer lies in
the social purposes served by the myth. "You have, in the crack baby and mother,
both a perfect victim and a perfect villain. Who is more innocent than an unborn
or a newly born child? It's the ultimate angelic victim. On the other hand, who
could be a more demonic villain than a woman who would put this child at risk
for something as awful and selfish as her own pleasure? Central casting couldn't
do better."

The crack baby myth also helped
assuage guilt about the massive cuts to social services that preceded the crack
epidemic in the ghettos--and which may have exacerbated it, given that
widespread crack addiction occurred almost invariably in poverty-stricken
communities. The very word "ghetto" conjures up images of black and brown
people, so while the crack baby was angelic, it was also a racialized, infant
demon: a baby destined to grow up mentally deficient and criminal because of the
damage done by its monstrous parent. "This image fit perfectly with conservative
ideology, because if we had any residual guilty feelings about having cut back
all the services that did even a little bit to help the poor, the idea of the
vile crack mother absolved us of all responsibility," says Reinarman.

"We had the welfare queen," says
Lynn Paltrow, an attorney and founder and executive director of National
Advocates for Pregnant Women. "The only thing that could top the welfare queen
was the crack mother welfare queen."

Paltrow represents Regina
McKnight, who, like the Jackson boys, is a victim of crack baby hysteria.
McKnight is serving out a 12-year sentence for murder in South Carolina because
her stillborn baby tested positive for a derivative of cocaine. She was
convicted in 2001. McKnight is the only woman in America serving time for this
"crime" and had no prior criminal record.

The ironies of McKnight's case
are profoundly disturbing. The mother of two had first been given crack by her
aunt, who hoped to end McKnight's depression following the death of her mother.
Her mom had been killed by a speeding truck driver who has since racked up
several drunk-driving convictions. Following the fatal accident, he was never
breath-tested, nor was he charged with a crime. The truck driver is white.
McKnight and her family are African American.

McKnight, who has a tenth-grade
education, got no prenatal care during any of her pregnancies. South Carolina
has no detox facilities for addicted pregnant women and does no outreach to
them. It is the state with the least per-capita spending on addiction treatment
in America. Until it lost in the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2001, the state had
a policy of secretly drug-testing pregnant women who sought prenatal care and
arresting those who came up positive. (Virtually everyone arrested under the law
was black.) Paltrow helped beat back that policy, successfully arguing to the
Court that the practice not only violated the women's constitutional rights, but
likely also deterred them from getting help.

Since lack of prenatal care is a
bigger factor than crack use in harming fetuses, and since the state had a
policy while McKnight was pregnant that effectively punished drug-using women
for seeking care, South Carolina may be more responsible for McKnight's child's
death than was McKnight herself.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court
declined to hear Paltrow's appeal in the McKnight case, and despite amicus
briefs from every relevant U.S. medical
association, the highest state court upheld her conviction. There is no medical
evidence suggesting that cocaine use was the only--or even the most
likely--cause of McKnight's baby's death. Paltrow is still working on appeals.

Years of research have debunked
the notion of the crack baby among medical experts, but the myth lingers, due
largely to inaccurate media items. Recently, the New York Times cited a
report published by the state of New Jersey claiming that 13 percent of all
infant deaths in the state are caused by maternal drug use. There is absolutely
no way that such a statistic could be accurately compiled, given how much
uncertainty there is about the link between drug use and infant deaths, and
considering the many other problems that women usually suffer from when they
give birth to drug-exposed babies. Nonetheless, the statistic was in the
newspaper of record--which will, no doubt, be cited by others as an unassailable
source.

The media has also been slow to
pick up on the fact that dire predictions about crack babies growing up to be
"super-predators" not only failed to materialize, but were completely
contradicted as the kids grew up. The first "crack babies" hit their teens in
the mid-1990s--when crime, youth violence, teen pregnancy and drug use began
dropping dramatically.

More skeptical coverage is needed
if the crack baby myth is ever going to die. When asked what he would have done
differently in the early 1980s when his work was used to justify the scare,
researcher Chasnoff said he wouldn't have spoken with the press. But with
well-funded conservative activist groups still actively pushing the
stereotype--one, a national group called CRACK, pays drug-addicted women $200 to
be sterilized or use long-term birth control--the voice of science is needed
more than ever.

Frank says that the very phrase
"crack baby" is inflammatory and should be abandoned. "Nobody these days would
refer to a child with trisomy 21"--Down's syndrome--"as a mongoloid idiot.
'Crack baby' is just as inappropriate. It should be no more acceptable in public
discourse than the N word."

Maia Szalavitz is
a New York-based writer who is working on a book about behavior-modification
programs for teenagers, to be published by Riverhead in 2005.

As medical and psychological researchers, with many years of experience studying
prenatal exposure to psychoactive substances, and as medical researchers,
treatment providers and specialists with many years of experience studying
addictions and addiction treatment, we are writing to request that policies
addressing prenatal exposure to methamphetamines and media coverage of this
issue be based on science, not presumption or prejudice.

The use of stigmatizing terms, such as "ice babies" and "meth babies," lack
scientific validity and should not be used. Experience with similar labels
applied to children exposed parentally to cocaine demonstrates that such labels
harm the children to which they are applied, lowering expectations for their
academic and life achievements, discouraging investigation into other causes for
physical and social problems the child might encounter, and leading to policies
that ignore factors, including poverty, that may play a much more significant
role in their lives. The suggestion that treatment will not work for people
dependant upon methamphetamines, particularly mothers, also lacks any scientific
basis.

Despite the lack of a medical or scientific basis for the use of such terms as
"ice" and "meth" babies, these pejorative and stigmatizing labels are
increasingly being used in the popular media, in a wide variety of contexts
across the country. Even when articles themselves acknowledge that the effects
of prenatal exposure to methamphetamine are still unknown, headlines across the
country are using alarmist and unjustified labels such as "meth babies."

Other
examples include an article about methamphetamine use in the MINNEAPOLIS STAR
TRIBUNE that lists a litany of medical problems allegedly caused by
methamphetamine use during pregnancy, using sensationalized language that
appears intended to shock and appall rather than inform, "...babies can be born
with missing and misplaced body parts. She heard of a meth baby born with an arm
growing out of the neck and another who was missing a femur." Sarah McCann,
"Meth ravages lives in northern counties" (Nov. 17, 2004 at N1). In May, one Fox
News station warned that "meth babies" "could make the crack baby look like a
walk in the nursery." Cited in "The Damage Done: Crack Babies Talk Back," Mariah
Blake, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW Oct/Nov 2004.

Although research on the medical and developmental effects of prenatal
methamphetamine exposure is still in its early stages, our experience with
almost 20 years of research on the chemically related drug, cocaine, has not
identified a recognizable condition, syndrome or disorder that should be termed
"crack baby" nor found the degree of harm reported in the media and then used to
justify numerous punitive legislative proposals.

The term "meth addicted baby" is no less defensible. Addiction is a technical
term that refers to compulsive behavior that continues in spite of adverse
consequences. By definition, babies cannot be "addicted" to methamphetamines or
anything else. The news media continues to ignore this fact.

A CNN
report was aired repeatedly over the span of a month, showing a picture of a
baby who had allegedly been exposed to methamphetamines prenatally and
stating: "This is what a meth baby looks like, premature, hooked on meth and
suffering the pangs of withdrawal. They don't want to eat or sleep and the
simplest things cause great pain." CNN, "The Methamphetamine Epidemic in the
United States," Randi Kaye. (Aired Feb. 3, 2005 - Mar. 10 2005).

One local National Public Radio
station claims that "In one Minnesota County, there is a baby born addicted
to meth each week." (Found at
news.minnesota.publicradio.org from June 14, 2004).

In utero
physiologic dependence on opiates (not addiction), known as Neonatal Narcotic
Abstinence Syndrome, is readily diagnosable and treatable, but no such symptoms
have been found to occur following prenatal cocaine or methamphetamine exposure.

Similarly, claims that methamphetamine users are virtually untreatable with
small recovery rates lack foundation in medical research. Analysis of dropout,
retention in treatment and re-incarceration rates and other measures of outcome,
in several recent studies indicate that methamphetamine users respond in an
equivalent manner as individuals admitted for other drug abuse problems.
Research also suggests the need to improve and expand treatment offered to
methamphetamine users.

Too often, media and policymakers rely on people who lack any scientific
experience or expertise for their information about the effects of prenatal
exposure to methamphetamine and about the efficacy of treatment. For example, a
NEW YORK TIMES story about methamphetamine labs and children relies on a law
enforcement official rather than a medical expert to describe the effects of
methamphetamine exposure on children. A police captain is quoted stating: ''Meth
makes crack look like child's play, both in terms of what it does to the body
and how hard it is to get off." (Fox Butterfield, Home Drug-Making Laboratories
Expose Children to Toxic Fallout, Feb 23, 2004 A1)

We are deeply disappointed that American and international media as well as some
policy makers continue to use stigmatizing terms and unfounded assumptions that
not only lack any scientific basis but also endanger and disenfranchise the
children to whom these labels and claims are applied. Similarly, we are
concerned that policies based on false assumptions will result in punitive civil
and child welfare interventions that are harmful to women, children and families
rather than in the ongoing research and improvement and provision of treatment
services that are so clearly needed.

We would be happy to furnish additional information if requested or to send
representatives to meet with policy advisors, staff or editorial boards to
provide more detailed technical information. Please feel free to contact David
C. Lewis, M.D., 401-444-1818,
David_Lewis@brown.edu, Professor of Community Health and Medicine, Brown
University, who has agreed to coordinate such requests on our behalf.